Thursday, September 13, 2012

Surprisingly, the iPhone 5 comes with version Apple A6 chip(labeled "S5L8950X") instead of a supercharged version of the chip A5X as previously thought. The specification page of Apple's iPhone 5 does not even mention the A6. In the page that compares the different versions of the iPhone name the chip, but without disclosing one iota about their architectural fundamentals.

In the presentation yesterday, Apple was limited (as it always does otherwise) to say how much faster the new processor, without going into the technical details as the core or clock speed. However, it seems that Apple has beaten strong components to other manufacturers such as Samsung and Texas, creating the first phone powered by an ARM processor with Cortex A15 platform.

Shimpo Anand Lal Anand Tech is knowledgeable about semiconductors. Specifically, what Apple says about an increase of twice the speed of the CPU, Anand wrote:

"Based on the performance improvements, Apple's history with the name of the SoC and some other things we've heard recently, it seems that Apple has integrated dual-core ARM Cortex A15 processor 32nm HK + MG LP Samsung. "

According to Anand, this implies that both Apple beats Samsung in IT as to bring the market A15S.

It is true that both Nvidia and Texas Instruments, Broadcom and Samsung have announced upcoming deployments, but it seems that Apple has overtaken everyone in the market.

The products announced, but not yet published, are the Samsung Exynos 5250, the nVidia Tegra 4 next Broadcom, Texas Instruments the OMAP5 or chip ST-Ericsson Nova A9600.

As you know, the A5 chip from the previous generation that powers the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 is manufactured by Samsung processor in 45 nm, and the chip A5X the iPad 3. Both chips use an ARM Cortex-A9 CPU.

ARM says Cortex A15 core is 40% faster than the Cortex A9. Changing to the 32 nm Samsung and other optimizations have made it possible to increase the performance and reduce power consumption in a processor by 22% smaller. A good example of leveraging technology that Cupertino fastcore purchased from Intrinsity.

This acquisition has enabled Apple detect engineering talent to develop a faster implementation of the ARM Cortex A8 CPU inside the A4 chip. And even with the added oomph, the battery of the iPhone 5 gets last somewhat longer than its predecessor, the iPhone 4S.

According to Apple, the standby time of the iPhone 5 is 225 hours, 25 hours more than the iPhone 4S. In 3G browsing has also increased from six hours in the iPhone 4S to 8 hours on the iPhone 5 (in navigation through WiFi also increased from nine to ten hours). The sailing time in LTE iPhone 5 is 8 hours and the talk time is the same as the iPhone 4S.

On the increase of speed on the CPU side, this should be evident in everyday tasks, helps Apple argues that switching between applications faster, photo capture is 40% faster allows work better panorama mode that captures 8-megapixel individual images to finally assemble a panorama of 28 megapixels and allows a better graphics in games and content creation applications like iMovie.

As for the GPU, speculates that the gain Ananad 2x "could come through a PowerVR SGX543 4 cores, 2 cores versus having the iPhone 4S."

Seth Weintraub of 9to5Mac, speculated in May with the possibility that Apple had "something new" for the graphics subsystem:

"The GPU chip, which will remain part of the SoC, called" SGX543RC * ".This GPU technically does not exist yet and we have no specifications. "

Apparently the A6 chip is inside the iPhone 5 still using the British graphic units Imagination Technologies (as variants A5 and A4 above). Apple probably used the SGX543MP4 GPU, as in the iPad 3.